Last week, I had the chance to addend the SearchEngineStrategies in London, together with three of my colleagues. For me, it was the second time to attend a search engine conference, the SES in New York last year was my first.

Unlike usually, I haven’t seen a lot of reports and recaps of the sessions of the SES London. I’ve seen more than a few, but not as much as normally. Since Lee Odden already discussed the session Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions perfectly, I’ll refrain to the other link building related session only.

Dixon Jones, Matt Paines, Ken McGaffin and Brian Turner were the speakers during the session that discussed Linking Strategies. Receptional‘s Dixon Jones opened this session with an excellent presentation.

Next up was XSEO‘s Matt Paines. He discussed a few of the most popular and common link building strategies and explained which strategy still is effective (according to him) and which one isn’t. I missed the enthusiasm and passion that most speakers have, which resulted in a presentation that I actually didn’t like. No offense, but I really didn’t.

Ken McGaffin was the third to give a presentation. While he left the link building business for a job at Wordtracker a while ago, he showed that he still most definitely knows what he’s talking about. One very important point he stressed out was the fact that, for optimal results, your marketing department, Public Relations and SEO/ Link Building should work together to a common strategy. Ken also gave 6 possible strategies to get a better link profile. In stead of naming the ordinary stuff, he listed some interesting tips that you don’t see every day:
1. Control the flow of your existing links
2. Find out who links to you and how
3. Get the most out of existing links
4. Look at sectors where you’re weak (new market opportunities)
5. Look for emerging markets (gave the example of Mark J. Penn’s MicroTrends)
6. Plan your initiatives for the year ahead

The last in row was SES virgin Brian Turner of BriteCorp. You certainly couldn’t tell that it was his first SES presentation, which means he did a remarkable job. He divided all links into three different categories; Submitted links, Paid links and Editorial links. Brian also explained how you can obtain links from each of those categories and mentioned that the last category is the one where you want your links from.

As you can see, this was a very short recap of two days SES (I missed the first day). While I’m not very good at summarizing PowerPoint presentations, I still wanted to share this.

For websites that have been around for a while, starting a link marketing campaign is much easier than you might think. There’s no need to go out and hunt for new links straight ahead, because it’s usually much easier, faster and more effective to take a look at nearby data.

1. Internal linking structure
Optimizing the internal link structure of a website can be highly effective, but is often underestimated and therefore neglected. Check out Jim Boykin’s post about optimizing internal links and Aaron Wall’s follow up on that post for some great tips.

2. 404 page statistics
Are people linking to non existing pages on your domain? Use Google Webmaster Tools (or your own web stats) to find out which URLs have received links (and /or clicks), but return a 404 page. Contacting the webmasters of the sites that are linking to the non existing pages and letting them know what the correct location should be is a guarantee for success.

3. URL search queries
Contacting websites that mention your URL, but didn’t make it a clickable link, might result in a few easy links as well. If they list your URL, they’re probably willing to make it clickable (and perhaps change the anchor text?) as well.

4. Company name search queries
See #3, but search for web pages that mention your company name (but don’t link to you) in stead. After you contacted about every webmaster that mentioned either your URL or your company name without providing a link to your site, don’t forget to add both queries as a Google Alert or something similar. It’s not only a great tool to monitor your online reputation, but you can use it as a link building support tool as well.

5. Optimizing existing links
Another strategy that can be very effective is optimizing your existing links. There are two ways to do this; either by making the link more attractive for visitors or by making the link more appealing to search engines. Investigate which links send you a reasonable amount of traffic and see if you can improve this by altering the anchor text to something that encourages clicking the link. Investigate which links are the most important ones according to Google and see if you can improve the relevance by altering the anchor text to something that adds even more value. Keep in mind not to overdo this in both cases; “Now with a 6% discount!” isn’t a great anchor text for search engines, and a “keyword keyword keyword” anchor text probably doesn’t attract a bucket load of visitors in most cases, so finding a balance is important.

See? Five easy link building strategies that don’t involve scavenging, hunting, baiting or other work intensive tactics. Using easily accessible data and contacting people that are already familiar with your website in some kind of way is not only efficient, but can be very effective as well.

Do you have more strategies to add?

Well, Google says it’s up to Aaron Wall to decide…

Last month, Jim Boykin wrote a great post about where he tries to determine where Google draws the paid links line. In the discussion at Sphinn, even Matt Cutts joined in to leave a comment, but he also wasn’t able to make the line clear. Well, after seeing something like this, it’s getting more and more clear to me that it’s not possible for Google to draw a line anywhere.

The paid link line (what’s a paid link and what isn’t) is so thin, that one single sentence could be enough to cross it. Notice that last line in the post at ProBlogger (“We’d love for comments to be as constructive, helpful and practical as possible. May the best comment win“)? This sentence could be interpreted as “write about this site at your blog and share your comments”, or as (what I think was intended) “leave a comment below in the comment section”. See the line here? Neither do I… Would that be paying for a review or is it just encouraging comments? On the other hand, if someone reviewed the website on his or her blog, but didn’t win the 5,000 visitors, would the link in the review still be a paid link? And what if Skellie offered 500 SU-visitors for the first ten people who drop a comment?

Although I think that it was Skellie’s intention to just simply request feedback, I’m sure that not everybody (like the first commenter) will see it this way. If even trained readers (yes, I consider online money making bloggers to be pretty Google-trained) can’t see the difference, how the heck is Google’s algorithm going to do this? Like others have said before, the paid links aren’t the problem, but it’s the algorithm that relies on them.

This is the living proof that you really should consider guest posting from time to time. A guest post from Janusz on Blogstorm.co.uk pointed me to his link analysis tool; Link Diagnosis. This is a great FireFox plugin, that analyzes link profiles very thoroughly. Check out the post at Blogstorm for some screen shots or check it out yourself.

If you read, hear, or talk a lot about links and how to build them on a daily basis (like I do), you’ll get slapped around the ears with the term authority links quite often. The answer to the question how to obtain such authority links depends, because there are different types of authority links; Absolute Authority Links (or general authority links) and Relative Authority Links (or topical authority links). While some strategies may lead to building links from both categories at the same time, you might have to use different approaches if you’re aiming at both kinds.

Absolute Authority Links
Absolute authority links are, like the name implies, links that are coming from a domain that is a general authority. You can even divide all absolute authority links into two different groups; informational authority links and navigational authority links. The difference between these groups is that informational authority domains, such as BoingBoing, CNN News or the Harvard Research Programs, usually are more trusted domains, that -for the most part- provide information. Websites like DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, or the California State Agencies Directory would be considered as navigational authority websites. The benefit of an absolute authority link is that it passes trust and visitors (in some cases lots of both). General navigational authority links also can have the ability to pass topical relevance. However, most absolute authority links aren’t able to pass relevance.

Relative Authority Links
In most industries, there are at least a few relative authority websites. Some websites that only have a few hundred incoming links can be authorities in their niche. While these websites aren’t absolute authority sites, the fact that almost every site in your industry links to it, makes it a very interesting target.
Relative authority links can also be divided into two groups, although the difference between both types (the informational ones and the navigational ones) is usually smaller here, because relative authority websites tend to focus at topic in stead of at audience.

Image by Macwagen

And 11 ways to get them
I’ll start with the easy ones, which all focus on getting navigational authority links. First, try to get a few quick links by submitting your website to a couple of (but only the worthwhile) directories. After this, make sure to get a few navigational relative authority links, by submitting your website to a few directories that focus on your niche. Step three is to search for other relevant navigational pages by searching for something like “keyword + links”, “keyword + related websites” or “keyword + more about this subject”. You’ll probably come up with something even better. Mix in a few local directories, city guides or other topography oriented websites and you’ve laid your link foundation.
-> These tactics will result in navigational authority links from both categories.

5. Trade links.
If you do this on a very limited basis, with highly relevant authority websites in your niche only, this strategy still works like a charm. And will probably never stop doing so.
-> Will result in absolute informational authority links.

6. Offer to write a column/ guest post/ interview.
This not only is a way to build your brand, but also lets you add links to your website in your bio and the article you write.
-> Will result in relative informational authority links or (relevant) absolute informational authority links.

7. Buy links.
What?!? You’ve never heard me say that buying links is bad, and you probably never will. I don’t think in terms of site wide mesothelioma crap in blog footers, but buying proper links in the right section of highly relevant websites still boosts your traffic and rankings.
-> Will result in (if you do it right) absolute informational authority links.

8. Contact websites and ask what they’re looking for.
While this sounds like an awfully simple tactic to get targeted links, there are only a few companies that build links this way. But think of it this way: Don’t you think a website will link to you if you create a tool/ article/ whatever that they’ve been looking for?
-> Will result in absolute informational authority links.

9. Get an intern.
Students usually have access to at least a few pages on the .edu domain of their school. While not everybody agrees on the fact that .edu’s are able to pass extra value because of the tld alone, a link from an educational domain may hold some extra value because of the amount and quality of the incoming links of this domain. But remember not to over exaggerate.
-> Will result in relative informational authority links.

10. Outsource your research.
In some occasions, a high school or university will be more than happy to perform a research on your behalf. In exchange for some student guidance, the educational institute will recruit a few students to help you with the research. And publish the results on the university website. The benefit of this strategy over the previous one, is that you might get a link from the “official” part of the .edu website, in stead of from a ~student page. The same thing here: don’t over exaggerate.
-> Will result in (relevant) relative informational authority links.

11. The Chamber of Commerce.
Most Chamber of Commerce websites are authority websites that provide a link to every registered company. In some cases, it’s even possible to style the link of your company’s registration page; don’t forget to use this option.
-> Will result in (relevant) relative informational authority links.

In stead of listing 11 ways to get authority links, I could have listed 31 or even 54 techniques to get these type of links. However, while obtaining a few authority links sure will improve your rankings, you shouldn’t focus on getting these alone. Mixing up different strategies, approaches and different types of links always works best. And remember that there is no such thing as a worthless link…